Today's New York Times brings exciting word of a new book by poet Rita Dove, a kind of narrative-in-poetry on the life of violinist George Bridgetower, the biracial violin prodigy of the early 19th century who was the original dedicatee of Beethoven's ferociously difficult 9th violin sonata (today known as the "Kreutzer" Sonata). MMM had a post on Bridgetower some months ago which you can read here. Dove was the former poet laureate of the United States, and is currently professor of English at the University of Virginia.
...the "house" in question is the newly reopened Alice Tully Hall, at New York's Lincoln Center. Turns out three of us from here in Columbia will get to be a part of the ongoing series of concerts in the days ahead to celebrate that reopening...on Friday Feb. 27 bassoonist Peter Kolkay will be playing there with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; next Tuesday March 3, bassoonist Michael Harley will be playing with the group Alarm Will Sound as part of a marathon concert at the hall, which concludes with Steve Reich and Musicians playing Music for 18 Musicians, and I'll be playing in Reich's band for that part of the concert. The Columbia connection continues in a sense the very next night; Derek Bermel, whose works Alarm Will Sound will be playing at Tully, flies down to the Midlands to play clarinet with Music from Copland House, who will be playing on the Southern Exposure concert series at the USC School of Music.
They brought down the final piece of Shea Stadium yesterday, to make way for parking lots for the New York Mets' new home next door, Citi Field. It made me sad to see the slide show of this last remnant being demolished...Shea has good memories for me. It was uniformly derided, with some justification, as part of the wave of cookie-cutter suburban style antiseptic baseball stadiums of the 1960's, now out of vogue as new or relatively new parks seek urban homes and the quirky features of vintage ballparks...obviously Baltimore's Camden Yards being the best example of this.
But Shea, along with Baltimore's former ballpark, Memorial Stadium, is where I learned to love baseball, which in this Rodriguez-dominated week we need reminding is a beautiful, poetic sport. As a student at Peabody Conservatory in the late 70's and early 80's, I thrilled to the exploits of the Baltimore Orioles as they repeatedly contended for, and then won in 1983, the World Series title. Moving to New York and throwing myself into the professional music world in that year of the Orioles' title, I could never embrace the O's American League rivals the Yankees, so I felt comfortable taking on the cause of the then hapless Mets of the other league, and I went many times to games at Shea.
Soon of course the Mets turned things completely around, and I am grateful I got to witness firsthand the brilliance of the Mets of that mid-80's era, including the Series-winning '86 team...the overpowering dominance of Dwight Gooden, the elegant athleticism of Darryl Strawberry, and every strategy-wonk's hero, Keith Hernandez. The sad downfalls of many of these players, especially Gooden and Strawberry, do not diminish in any way the memory for me of their brilliant play on brilliant days at Shea. And unlike some of those other 60's-era ballparks, going to Shea still was a fundamentally urban experience, at least coming from Manhattan: it required a subway ride to Times Square station, then the change to the #7, riding through Jackson Heights and the incredible panorama of internationally-diverse neighborhoods, stores, restaurants, and so forth that you passed through on the way to the stadium.
Thinking too, about how life gets progressively more complicated and challenging in many ways as you get older (something middle-aged people always tell young folks but they never believe), I look back on those endless afternoons in summers of the mid to late 1980's, before I was married (even for a first time), before having a child, before I even had much employment to speak of, and I marvel that I ever had as much free time as I did then. And nothing says "free time" like going to a baseball game, which itself marches to a 19th-century beat, which in fact only ends after certain events have taken place, not according to any ticking clock.
Major League Baseball, which in those days I used to follow so intensely as I pored over Bill James' Baseball Abstracts while eating late breakfasts at West Side diners, long ago lost its hold on me. That happened for me before the steroid era; it was free agency that did it, the inability really to follow a team's system, philosophy, the breakdown of the reliable feeder system from the minor leagues; by the early 90's I was only going to ball games on rare occasion and mostly to satisfy curiosity about different ballparks, to put the Wrigley Field notch on my belt, and so forth.
Though I'm down on major league ball these days, I do have a promising new avenue for my smoldering love of the game itself: college baseball. Down here in South Carolina we are in the land of high-quality college ball, and just as Shea's last bits tumble down, so is a spanking-new stadium opening here in Columbia for the University of South Carolina's baseball team. Situated near the banks of the Congaree River, with views of downtown, it seems the perfect place to introduce my son in the years ahead to the joys of a summer afternoon spent root, root, rooting for the home team.
"Live" versus "lip-synching" or "play-synching" is back in the news again, this time over the admission that the rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner we heard at the recent Super Bowl from Jennifer Hudson was prerecorded (which was pretty obvious at the time, as it also was with Faith Hill's "America the Beautiful."). For the over-the-top ritual that the Supe's pregame festivities have become, it doesn't really matter to me...but the article caught my attention and I am sharing it with you because of the justification for the lip-synching given by Rickey Minor, who is musical director for "American Idol" and did the arrangement performed by Ms. Hudson. Anybody who performs for a living will enjoy Mr. Minor's reasoning, which was: "There's too many variables to go live."
Isn't that kind of the point of live performance? You know, the, uh...variables?
[Update 1/23: Just as I thought at the time along with several others trading comments on Facebook during the Inauguration, the music we were hearing from Messrs. Ma et al was indeed a recording...there were several visual cues that seemed to indicate at the time, but since I had not read any confirmation of that either in the MSM or the blogosphere, I started to doubt my conclusion...today's New York Times confirms the performance was a "play-along." Not really a big deal to me either way, still glad that sort-of-classical music got such a prominent spot at this moment in American history. Weather and circumstances and the very nature of chamber music made this solution pretty much essential, I think.]
Just a quick hit here about Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Obama and the music therein, specifically "classical" music's little moment in the sun. The John Williams arrangement of "Simple Gifts"? Pretty nice arrangement, I thought, and to hope for more or something different would be unrealistic. That puts me at odds with Mark Swed in the LA Times who found the Williams arrangement "hokey" (I don't agree, I mean we are talking John Williams here, and I thought it was a fairly elegant realization) and Anne Midgette at the Washington Post who thought Williams wasn't hokey enough. She writes that Williams "made the mistake so many popular artists do when confronted with
classical music: rather than write what he is good at, he corseted
himself in a straitjacket of what he thought he was supposed to be
doing." A metaphor for the debate over the size and scope of the economic stimulus package?
Meanwhile, how 'bout that Aretha Franklin? I thought pretty darn impressive considering the difficulty of keeping those vocal chords limber and lubricated in the freezing cold. Unfortunately this version of "My Country Tis of Thee" modulated up a half-step in the final minute, which given the conditions, was probably a half-step too far.
Now that we have a President Obama, the arts community is jostling for position with hands open to get a piece of the bailout. Things have actually gone much farther with that, with real discussion about the role of the arts in our national culture, and this is a good thing. My email has lately been swamped with attachments for an online petition to get Obama to create a cabinet-level "Secretary of the Arts." I haven't signed any of these because, quite frankly, I have very mixed feelings about that idea. In general I believe the music world is already tilted too much to the "management" side and not the folks who actually make the music; ditto other arts, probably. The idea of a cabinet-level arts agency tells me that a lot of arts administrators are going to get work. Am I excited about that? Not really. Plus I'm not sure about the giant bullseye that creates for conservatives to shoot at.
On the other hand, some of the proposals I've seen out there call for something much smaller, more targeted, more goal-oriented: something like a White House Arts Advisor that would be roughly equivalent to what already exists for the sciences. Tyler Green in his blog makes by far the most persuasive case for this that I've read. This is something I can get behind.
In any case high-level meetings have been underway with the Obama transition team. Some of those are detailed in this story from Musical America and this very interesting summary by Deanna Isaacs in the Chicago Reader.
